Analyzing effect of meditation using higher order crossings and functional connectivity

Abstract

People are experiencing difficulties in adapting to the rapid changes in work and social fabric due to the evolution of advanced technologies in everyday life. Health and well-being of an individual in the existing world is important for proper living. Meditation improves the adaptability of an individual to live a healthy and social life. To verify this, an experiment is designed with the simple meditation practice called Focused Attention for 8 weeks. The brain activity is recorded of 11 subjects using EMOTIV EPOC+EEG device before (pre-meditation) and after (post-meditation) meditation. Features calledHigher Order Crossings and Functional Connectivity are used to analyze the effect of meditation. The results indicated a decrease in HOC values for frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes and increase in HOC of temporal lobe. The interhemispheric connectivity increased aftermeditation practice.